Growth and Infrastructure Act 2013

The Growth and Infrastructure Act has now received Royal Assent and become law. Among its various provisions is the potential for reconsideration of Section 106 agreements that have been negotiated between developers and local planning authorities to secure community benefits from new developments. The argument that has been put forward is that existing S. 106 agreements are rendering developments unviable and therefore holding up new build projects. Let these agreements be renegotiated to reduce the financial burden on the developer, and then these projects would go ahead. It has been suggested that the construction of 75,000 homes could be prompted by this measure. This could be seen just as a further move towards deregulation; I think this is wrong as it is more a restructuring of regulation to tip the balance of power towards the developer. But more interesting is the assumption explicitly built into the new legislation that planning has to operate within the constraints of the viability of private sector development. This builds on previous policy guidance from the Coalition Government to local authorities, as set out in the National Planning Policy Framework for example, that ensuring the viability of development must be a core principle guiding local plan making. The explicitness of this acknowledgement that current planning practice is reliant on the decisions and investment activities of private sector developers is at the heart of growth-dependent planning. But the move to allow S.106 agreements to be renegotiated also shows the limitations of this paradigm. Planners can no longer weigh up the costs and benefits of a development proposal with any certainty, as the negotiated benefits of planning gain may be open to reconsideration; broadly the community will get less for permitting the development to go ahead. The message seems to be that the local planning authority and local communities should be happy to get the development itself and little more.